I left the area in 1998. so haven't heard from him since then.. He used to work fairly locally until that factory closed-down. and the last time I actually spoke to Barney was when he was running a variant of WNKR on MW out of North-Kent in about 2007-ish.. and I called his mobile... so I'm really out of contact with the team from back then....

On a plod back to barnies place fron the albany in Albany-Park where we both lived at one time. (on the evening the name was created) we had.. West and north kent european radio, Cental London Independant transmitters and a few more too.... We settled on West and North Kent Radio over a few pints of beer, as it looked like the USA callsigns. Only later did we find that Andy Walker had started his station WFRL wonderful free radio London...

One of the WNKR DJs lived in the road behind the shopping centre (Rob Marshall), And another two lived near the police-station (Uncle-Nobby, and Bob Jarman). Later-on after leaving Albany-Park Barney lived down the bowling-alley-end... One of the pubs where we used to open the mail from wuppertaal was the rose!.. At one time the studio was in Bexleyheath too! ( for a few of the bank-holiday broadcasts.).

Hugo once told Barney (in The 7 Scars, as I recall), that his station should be called West And North Kent Electric Radio.....

Hugo and Legless Lurch famously tried and beheaded Justin Simmonds on the air for "Interfering with a much nicer radio station". I think that I've got it on tape somewhere:

Judge (Les): "You stand accused of interfering with a much nicer radio station. How do you plead?"

Justin (Hugo): "Sycophantically, your honour!"

Is Hugo still around?

Hugo is still around, I had a pint with him earlier this year and am in regular contact.
I doubt it was in the Seven Stars that Hugo made that comment, more likely the Albany or possibly the White Cross I know I'll drink in most places but at that time I would've drawn the line at the Stars.
I remember Les T he lived less than a dozen houses from me. I don't think I know you though Albert.

Dave Martin
Founder and manager of WNKR
Designer of the Commando and Corsair AM transmitters, developed to promote easy to build short wave transmitters for the hobby LBP.

Trancetechnic: I've seen those boards before - they're a very bad copy of an old Broadcast Warehouse board! At least Roger had a clue about screening and filtering and wouldn't use an S18 coil in the output of a 150Watt PA.

As I recall, JD and SM had a load of those boards etched by a PCB company in Wimbledon (I seem to remember). They had "simplified" the layout, without being aware of the ramifications and without the right test gear to detect and sort out the problems. They made loads of those PAs and sold them to lots of stations who couldn't understand why they kept getting raided......

There were two versions on the same PCB - the one you've got, and another with a BLF244 driver. Neither of them worked properly. I received two of the BLF244 boards in rigs from a station just north of London, who couldn't understand why they were causing interference to their local cab company..... I connected my signal generator, a dummy load and a regulated bench supply and spectrum analysed what was coming out of it:

The drive was on 94.2MHz, and there were two small spurs in the aircraft band, loads of second and third harmonic, a few other spurs in Band I and lots of "noise" around the carrier. By fitting screening in the right places, the 2nd and 3rd almost completely disappeared. Adding a bit of base damping to the final and correcting the match into the driver got rid of the spurs and close-in noise. I found that the output match was poor - they'd got a couple of capacitors wrong when they copied the original and Roger probably fitted the S18 to fool the copiers. Correcting the values, removing the S18 and fitting the correct coil, the current consumption decreased and the power output increased - the efficiency increased significantly, and the heatsink was much cooler.

I reassembled the whole rig, fixed the nasty synthesiser whine, and it was doing about 145 clean Watts and staying cool. Fixing the other one only took about 20 minutes!

SM could only ever copy designs, when I started him off building back in 87 he couldn't read a schematic. I built him one master copy of each circuit and he just duplicated each one, then over to my place for set up and corrections.
He was very good with the copies, rarely making mistakes but then got his own test equipment and didn't bring them to me for final set up and test. I don't think he ever developed a design of his own. He is now in Turkey living the dream. Well at least he thinks he is.

Dave Martin
Founder and manager of WNKR
Designer of the Commando and Corsair AM transmitters, developed to promote easy to build short wave transmitters for the hobby LBP.

Hugh, Les, Andy B Driver and I certainly met at the 7 Scars one night because Hugh wanted to see someone there.... My memory of those days is rather hazy.

Les T and HLJ (HB) were actually very creative programme makers - some of their programmes were very funny - I wish I had a few of them on tape. It was a pity that Radio Weird (mostly) came from Les T's house, with a groundplane aerial in the roof. The attenuation must have been pretty severe. Did you ever see that QQV0320 rig that they had? Les cranked the anode voltage up so much (by messing with the transformer tappings) that there was a blue corona around the bottle! I hate to think how much x-ray was coming off that thing!